Tag Archives: Crypto-Jacking

KnowBe4, the provider of the world’s largest security awareness training and simulated phishing platform, has released the results of new research. The company’s report examines over 350 organisations globally and reveals the security weaknesses and concerns within them. On average, 81% of organisations had some degree of concern around security issues.

Cyber crime continues to evolve and become more sophisticated. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are leveraged by many criminal organisations to help them better understand how to improve their attacks and they’re now targeting specific industry verticals, organisations and even individuals.

Increases in the frequency of ransomware, phishing and crypto-jacking attacks have been experienced by businesses of nearly every size, vertical and location.

When it comes to attack vectors, data breaches are the primary concern, with credential compromise coming a close second. These two issues go hand-in-hand as the misuse of credentials remains the foremost attack tactic in data breaches. That’s according to Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report.

Phishing and ransomware ranked next, demonstrating that organisations are still not completely prepared to defend themselves against these relatively “old” attack vectors.

Other key findings

*92% of organisations rank end users as their primary security concern. At the same time, security awareness training along with phishing testing tops the list of security initiatives that organisations need to implement

*Organisations today have a large number of attack vectors to prevent, monitor for, detect, alert and remediate. In terms of attacks, 95% of those organisations surveyed are most concerned with data breaches

*Ensuring security is in place to meet General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements is still a challenge for 64% of organisations, despite the GDPR’s fine details having been public knowledge for quite some time

*Attackers’ use of compromised credentials is such a common tactic. 93% of organisations are aware of the problem, but still have lots of work to do to stop it

*When it comes to resources, 75% of organisations don’t have an adequate budget

“2018 was a prolific year for successful cyber attacks, with many of them caused by human error,” said Stu Sjouwerman, CEO of KnowBe4. “IT organisations are tasked with establishing and maintaining a layered security defence. The largest concern, as demonstrated again in this report, is employees making errors. Organisations must start their defence by establishing a security culture. In order to combat the escalation of social engineering, they absolutely have to ensure that users are trained and tested.”